The Garrick Year

From the Golden PEN Award-winning author: A "well-written, entertaining" dark comedy of a marriage on the rocks in 1960s London (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times). Emma and David Evans seem to have a perfect life. He's a handsome and successful Welsh actor; she's a sometimes model, soon-to-be television news anchor, and full-time mother. But all is not well under the surface. She's impatient and choked by domesticity; he's narcissistic and unfaithful. Between the two of them is a privately combative marriage that has fed their want of drama. Then David relocates the family from their London home to provincial Hereford, where he's to star in two plays during the city's festival season. It's here, far removed from the highbrow stimulation of the city, that Emma's resentment of David--his long hours, his expectations, his ego--finally boils over. Bored and lonely, she falls into the arms of the theater's director, an indiscretion that triggers a series of surprises neither Emma nor David could have foreseen. Narrated by a complicated, fascinating, and fiercely intelligent woman at the end of her rope, The Garrick Year is "a witty, beautiful novel . . . written with extraordinary art" (The New York Times). "[A] romantic novel about actors and the theatre and marriage and sex and babies . . . deliciously bitter . . . so alive." --The New Yorker "Unsparing . . . a very knowing, diverting entertainment." --Kirkus Reviews

About the Author :
Margaret Drabble is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Review :
Praise for Margaret Drabble"Reading a Margaret Drabble novel has always been like cozying up with a cup of hot tea by a gas fire with a dull English winter rain misting the window, and contemplating the story of one's own life." --The New York Times "As meticulous as Jane Austen, and as deadly as Evelyn Waugh."--Los Angeles Times "The deft commingling of the sentimental and the matter-of-fact is characteristic of writer Margaret Drabble...Drabble is one of the most versatile and accomplished writers of her generation." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker "Reading Margaret Drabble's novels has become something of a rite of passage...Sharply observed, exquisitely companionable tales of women of a certain age and class, educated, egocentric, strong, unlucky in love." --The Washington Post "Drabble's fiction has achieved a panoramic vision of contemporary life." --Chicago Tribune "What distinguishes Drabble's fiction from the commonplace is that, like Doris Lessing's early work, it nails femaleness. Drabble's women bleed, some metaphorically, but not all." --San Francisco Chronicle "A superb novelist." --The Dallas Morning News